topic Re: dynamic home directories and DFS in Network and Storage Protocols

dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:07:15 GMT

Hi Folks,

in my current environment I am looking for using dynamic home drives functionality on CDOT.. by spreading the users home folders on different volumes spread across all the nodes..

with dynamic home drives my windows team is looking to use DF functionality as well...... can this be done..?

Thanks in advance..

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

Sahana — Thu, 04 May 2017 03:46:44 GMT

Hi,

Please refer a similar discussion: http://community.netapp.com/t5/FAS-and-Data-ONTAP-Articles-and-Resources/Cheat-Sheet-Setting-up-a-Vserver-for-user-home-directories-in-a-Windows-File/ta-p/85024

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Thu, 04 May 2017 14:08:29 GMT

I got that.. by I am looking how this dynamic home directories assoicated with windows DFS functionality

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

SeanHatfield — Mon, 08 May 2017 17:12:53 GMT

Not sure what the end goal is. You want the user home drive to be a DFS path, that maps them back to their dynamic homedir on the SVM? Sure, since about 8.3.2GA.

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Mon, 08 May 2017 18:27:42 GMT

Yes user home drive to be a DFS path, that maps them back to their dynamic homedir on the SVM...

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

SeanHatfield — Mon, 08 May 2017 23:08:59 GMT

In that case add a homedir share CIFS.HOMEDIR with a path %w then point your DFS leaf at \\yoursvm\CIFS.HOMEDIR

This mimics the homedir feature from 7mode. If you transition a homedir config over from 7mode, 7MTT sets this up for you. When a user with a home directory on the SVM connects to that DFS path, they should land in their home directory.

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Tue, 09 May 2017 12:07:36 GMT

well when I was trying to create the share CIFS.HOMEDIR

cifs share create -share-name CIFS.HOMEDIR -path %w /// Below is the error message I am getting

Error: command failed: Failed to create CIFS share CIFS.HOMEDIR. Reason: Standard shares must define an absolute share path in the Vserver's namespace

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

SeanHatfield — Tue, 09 May 2017 14:38:41 GMT

The key thing in the message is "standard shares". Hit tab to prepopulate the -share-properties and append homedirectory to the property list. Then you should see a prompt similar to this:

Cluster1::vserver cifs*> share create -share-name CIFS.HOMEDIR -path %w -share-properties oplocks,browsable,changenotify,show-previous-versions,homedirectory -vserver svm1demo

Warning: The home directory share's name "CIFS.HOMEDIR" does not
         contain a substitution value (%u or %w) to uniquely identify
         a home directory share. If multiple users from the same
         client access their home directories at the same time,
         unprotected access to each other's files can occur. This
         might cause unexpected "access denied" errors on those
         files, and data corruption within those files.
         Note: multiple users from a single client is most likely in
         a Citrix or Windows Terminal Services environment.
Do you want to continue? {y|n}:

Note the warning. This scenario can occur if multiple users connect from the same OS instance, such as a terminal server.You may not want to turn this on in a citrix environment.

You'll also need to setup your search paths and qtrees or directoriees for the user home if you have not already done so.

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Tue, 09 May 2017 16:38:30 GMT

Thanks Sean,

then this method will impact us ...since we have subset of users always loggin through citrix.

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

dan_arteritano — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 20:51:40 GMT

I just went throught this, I was migrating a multiple search path cifs.homedir from a 7-mode system to a cDOT SVM.

Windows DFS has a share for Home

I created a cifs.homedir on th e cDOT cluster using w% usng this command:

vserver cifs share create -share-name nashomedir -path %w -share-properties oplocks,browsable,changenotify,show-previous-versions,homedirectory

vserver cifs home-directory search-path add -vs svmf001 -path /SYS_home
vserver cifs home-directory search-path add -vs svmf001 -path /hm/users
vserver cifs home-directory search-path add -vs svmf001 -path /hm/admins

DFS could not add the target

I deleted and recreated cifs.homedir as a regualr non-homedirectory share

vserver cifs share create -share-name nashomedir -path /hm

The target was added toDFS, no problem.

Then I deleted and recreated cifs.homedir again as I did with the original command.

vserver cifs share create -share-name nashomedir -path %w -share-properties oplocks,browsable,changenotify,show-previous-versions,homedirectory

Then I could use the DFS share and it took me to my home folder

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

naveens17 — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 12:49:05 GMT

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your response.

Can I know the version of ONTAP your running.

and I also see your using the cifs share path as 'static' pointing to %w but doing that you will have impact in environment like citrix.

Warning: The home directory share's name "homedir" does not contain a substitution value (%u or %w) to uniquely identify a home directory share. If multiple users from
the same client access their home directories at the same time, unprotected access to each other's files can occur. This might cause unexpected "access denied"
errors on those files, and data corruption within those files.
Note: multiple users from a single client is most likely in a Citrix or Windows Terminal Services environment.

Re: dynamic home directories and DFS

dan_arteritano — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 18:02:32 GMT

Hello,

We were running ONTAP 9.0, IMHO this was a DFS issue not a NetApp issue.

In my post I created a regular share call nashomedir without %w so DFS would be able to access an actual share, either deleted nashomedir and recreated it with the command below:

vserver cifs share create -share-name nashomedir -path %w -share-properties oplocks.browsable, changenotify, show-previous-versions, homedirectory